In Honour of Cecil the Lion… "I don’t believe in a hierarchy of species. I don’t think we’re evolving into something magnificent. I don’t think I’m any better than those dogs outside and I don’t think they’re any better than the worms in the ground that are sustaining the peas and beans in the garden. I think there is complexity in nature that increases, but not merit." – Charles Bowden, Author

Category Archives: writing

“April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass….but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.

At those times I would write… In my letters to her, I would describe only things that were touching or pleasant or beautiful: the fragrance of grasses, the caress of a spring breeze, the light of the moon, a movie I’d seen, a song I liked, a book that had moved me. I myself would be comforted by letters like this when I would reread what I had written. And I would feel that the world I lived in was a wonderful one. I wrote any number of letters like this…”

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“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” …Lewis Carroll.

When I was a kid, aside from wanting to be a writer, part of me wanted to be an architect. To design and build houses – and castles – from the ground up. To focus on the 3-D aesthetic of what goes where and how it all fits together. As I grew up, I realized that you don’t have to build houses to focus on the elements of construction. And so today, I want to talk about literary structure, about how, as writers, we are architects with words.

First, let me clarify: I am not talking about plot. Personally, I tend to be a little lukewarm about plot. But I love structure.

And at heart, structure is largely a matter of knowing – and keeping – a story’s time.

Long ago, one chilly Paleolithic evening, our storytelling ancestors sat around the hearth and talked about their day tracking woolly rhinos and dodging cave bears. And when there was a lull in the tale someone would invariably say, “What happened next?”

Such an A-to-B-to-C progression is, after all, how we live, and literature – even at its most fantastic – tends to mirror life. It is this familiarity, no matter how tenuous, which draws the reader in and lets them (us) say, “Yes! I can relate to that person/dormouse/dragon. They have elevenses before tea just like I do.”

This is the natural flow of time, the requisite of history books, biographies, and Dickensian tomes beginning with “I was born.” Chronology. Day follows day, week follows week, year, year, in a logical progression. Just as you build a house floor to wall to roof, so you build a tale beginning to middle to end. This is the skeleton upon which we drape characters and plots, themes and lofty metaphors. Spanning an hour or a century, a linear sense of time serves as the most simple – reliable – framework for a story.

So, your foundation runs deep, load-bearing walls are in place, no holes in your roof. You have a solid structure; now, within reason, you can do most anything with it. As long as the ornamentation suits the tale, go for it. Add a tower for lofty perspective or a priest’s hole full of subplot and tangential intrigue. Paint the walls with psychedelic murals or line them with yard after yard of leather-bound books. These are the details of character and text that make fiction more than a string of events. Though remember: adding gingerbread to an intimate tale for the hell of it tends to read as just showing off. You want to enhance, not distract.

You can even start having fun with time, an increasing used conceit of contemporary fiction. One of my favorite plays is Harold Pinter’s classic, “Betrayal,” which spins out across the stage from end to beginning, from good-bye to hello, last awkward look first fervid touch. And yet, as much as Pinter manipulated the presentation of events, his frame’s always solid.

Jeremy Irons, Patricia Hodge – “Betrayal”

Or you have something like William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” in which, without strict regard for chronological order, the Compson brothers (and Dilsey, the family cook) explore not only their relationships with each other, but also their personal relationships with time. In the end, Time takes on a character all its own, defining the Compsons as profoundly as any human connection they might have.

Leaving typical notions of chronology even further by the wayside is Julio Cortazar’s interactive lyric novel, “Hopscotch.” Escheresque in its complexity, Cortazar so fractured his temporal world that he provided reading instructions for the book – a sort of temporal GPS, if you will, lest you get lost. (If you haven’t read it, give it a shot; it’s a treat on many levels.) But even Cortazar doesn’t abandon a temporal framework entirely. It is still there, the underlying – if extreme – blueprint to his work.

One last thought, strictly from an editor’s perspective. Flaws and deviations from sound structure are often easy to see and usually easy to fix. If you find yourself getting lost along your way, step back and see where you went down the wrong hallway, opened the wrong door, and backtrack to the basics.

Granted, not everyone has architectural sensibilities. If you can’t see something yourself, go to someone who can. That’s what editors are for.

OK. I’ve rambled quite enough.

For now.

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Those of you who visited the Editor’s Corner last week will likely think I am working in a backasswards fashion. Given that I am never quite sure what I will tackle until I set fingers a typing, I am actually surprised this doesn’t happen on a regular basis.

Be that as it may, last week I spoke about going macro and reclaiming your Big Picture. Today, I want to turn the telescope around and talk micro: the realm of detail and what particular details tell the reader. A character can have breakfast, sure. But a breakfast of corn flakes and black coffee says something very different than eggs benedict and fresh pomegranate juice. A simple suburban house tells us far less about its occupants than a Cape Cod on a corner lot with a thriving vegetable garden around back. John Cheever would certainly never settle for the former! It is the details which define our setting, our characters, their actions, and are, at times, as important as all the broad brush thematic flourishes on which we prefer to focus.

In short, I am talking world building via vivid detail, the “life blood,” as John Gardner said, of fiction. And though ‘world building’ is a phrase more familiar to those of us who delve into the sci-fi/fantasy genres, I believe it remains apt for all.

Caveat emptor: I, as a rule, am one of those fantasy/sci-fi folk. I stride across landscapes alien and strange even when set in the relatively familiar environs of our home world. This often requires world building of the highest order, from geography to flora and fauna. That said, not anything goes. Quite the contrary. When we world build from scratch, we can be outrageous as long as the core structure is 100% authentic and believable. Natural law must apply. We can, of course, rewrite natural law but that usually demands far more exposition than most readers will abide. Thus, the best sci-fi/fantasy is grounded in a relative degree of familiarity. Air and water and gravity are constants for life; fish – or their counterparts – swim, and dragons –or their counterparts – fly. Within such parameters, all sorts of things can happen and the more detail you give your world, the more believable it becomes; the more clearly your reader can imagine your tale.

Example: I am currently (still – I mentioned this story a couple of weeks ago and chide myself daily for my slow progress) reediting a short story which takes place on very foreign soil, the planet Asru-Nai. Though Earthlike in terms of atmosphere and livability, there are notable distinctions. Geographically, Asru-Nai is closer to Venus, with mountains that would dwarf Everest and a shallow sea twice the size of the Pacific. The latter creates real-life problems, like massive storms and tsunamis. This requires a believable solution: the colonists must terraform a vast archipelago of barrier islands to mitigate nature’s chaos. The flora and fauna are a treat to create, though I admit I spent 2 hours today trying to find the right name for a harbor delicacy that was both unusual and demanding no explanation. Tricky that, but the sort of thing which is essential flesh on a story’s bones. (I settled on braised jawfish on a bed of fern-root.)

Now, you don’t have to travel across the cosmos to build worlds. Every detail is important. More to the point, those details we choose to include in our work – as opposed to the plethora of authorial backstory – should BE important. We are painters with words and without detail the best we can hope for are rather ill-focused monochromatic sketches. From warm skin to fairy hair, from a praying mantis waltzing through the rhododendrons to the floral sweetness of saffron in bouillabaisse, these are our tales, the colors of our palette, the building blocks of our fictive worlds.

I will try to respond to messages as I am able. At times it may be in the form of a post or a direct email response. Guests who post, I will forward messages addressed to them. It is up to them how they decide to correspond. — Shawn MacKENZIE – MacKenzie’s Dragonsnest

I was recently approached about undertaking a weekly sojourn through all things editing, and I thought, sure, why not! Of course, on second thought, I realized that much of what I do as an editor is informed by my work as a writer – even when I edit others. As such, it is internalized and occasionally idiosyncratic, certainly not the sort of thing I normally ramble on about. So, bear with me; this should be an interesting journey for all of us. — Shawn MacKENZIE

As an activity and a passion, editing, like writing, runs the gamut from macro to micro, from broad strokes on plot and character to the minutia of comma v. semi-colon.

Personally, I think it’s best to start big – so big that you’re not even dealing with your own work. To that end, my advice for today: Read.

Read everything and anything. The classics, the paper, your favorite guilty genre pleasure. Read Chekhov for dialogue, Christie for plot, dictionaries for joy, and Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare! Whatever strikes your fancy. Become a sponge, absorbing what works and wringing out what doesn’t. Internalize the basics of tense agreement, point of view, and active v. passive voice. I assure you, it is a hell of a lot more fun this way than sitting through a grammar class (which may teach you the rules, but not necessarily how to use them, let alone break them).

When you’re read-out, treat yourself to a clear, inspired mind: go to a museum or cafe or wildlife park. Look at art and animals and people, how they shimmer and move and connect. For it is all connected, be it words on a page or life in the world. That is the heart of our storytelling. It is not only good for the spirit, but will help you return to your words with invigorated eyes.

And then, at the end of the day, if you’re not too weary, thumb through Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for good measure. But more on that next Tuesday.

Every Tuesday Starting Tuesday November 11th 2013 “the secret keeper” Will Be Posting Sequential Archived Posts of the “Editor’s Corner” by Shawn MacKENZIE of MacKenzie’s Dragonsnest on ‘the secret keeper’

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I will try to respond to messages as I am able. At times it may be in the form of a post or a direct email response. Guests who post, I will forward messages addressed to them. It is up to them how they decide to correspond.— ShawnMacKENZIE –MacKenzie’s Dragonsnest

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Private Moments #85 “Horrors of Waiting”Poem Written by Jennifer KileyPost 27th October 2014Poem for Private WritingsChapter #85“they hear nothing”“Backing Off from DeathPaintingby jkm

“For that fine madness still he did retain,Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.” ~Michael Drayton~ (1563-1631)

Backing Off from Death (c) jkm

“Horrors of Waiting” By Madison Taylor22nd April 2009

The horrors of waiting for death
It claims us in its own time
In the time between time
Torture wracks the body with tension
Shatters the nerves
Until all rattles apart.

soothing starts when letting go Dying Leaving the body behind Setting the mind free The soul will sail out on wings like a bird of love Finding peace after waiting when time disappears Release is found.